The Internet has become the largest and certainly one of the most important computer networks in existence today. An enormous volume of data and information is communicated over the Internet daily, and this volume is growing rapidly. Internet access is accomplished through the use of domain names which uniquely identify a particular location an makes communicating with the site a directly simple task from anywhere in the world. Today, most of these Internet sites are typically available twenty-four hours a day unless there is some sort of technical malfunction associated with either the computer or communications systems that make access to the sites possible.
The domain names which identify sites are generally organized into several groupings designated by a top level domain name. One top level domain name is used to group all of the domain names that are associated with educational institutions. This is accomplished by using a designator of “.edu” at the end of the domain name to indicate that the organization belongs to the class of educational institutions. Other designators are used to indicate government and commercial interests. Also, the domain name itself usually contains information that may be used to delineate the particular name of the entity being represented. If a particular site is not always available for access, that site may have a “mirror” site which is available whenever a request is made. These mirror sites are usually updated on a periodic basis in order to maintain the data and information at as current a level as possible. Sometimes, the requester may not know that the site they are currently contacting is actually a mirror site, and that the data may not be current. This may, of course, cause the requester problems whose severity depends on the mirror site's update frequency, pattern and importance. This problem is amplified if the regular site is a mobile site and not available much of the time. Even worse, if the mobile site has no mirror site and the requester attempts continual contact while the mobile site is not operational, the requestor may draw false conclusions about the site's permanent situation.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a way to distinguish mobile sites on a computer network using a communications infrastructure.